When the Bombs Fell
by R Hancock
Summary: "I remember it like it was yesterday..." (Please leave honest reviews. In progress. [I DO NOT OWN FALLOUT OR ITS LIKENESS])
1. Chapter 1: Unveiled

_When the Bombs Fell_

Chapter One: Unveiled

I remember the day the bombs fell about as much as I remembered emerging from my mother's womb. It was a normal day, seemingly. Nothing was unusually different. Those who chose to enter a vault did so weeks prior, so everybody left was the remainder of those who chose to endure on their own. It was early, barely the break of dawn, when the madness began. Behind closed curtains and locked doors, what persisted of the city of Detroit lay dormant, unaware, and completely oblivious to the chaos that would inevitably rain down on the region. Nobody knew when it would happen, but according to the emergency broadcasts that had dominated the radio waves it would be soon. Sooner than we all could have expected, or wanted, rather. Those who stayed outside of the Vaults had their own plans to prevail against nuclear holocaust or had just dismissed the idea entirely. Visions of underground bunkers, enclosed living encampments, and tight-knit settlements plagued our minds. Dreams of progress, rebuilding, and a fresh start were prominent, pushing some more than others to solidify their existence in this post-apocalyptic world. While the minority prepared for nuclear war, the majority ignored it. This was America. The land of the free, the home of the brave, where those who remained steadfast overcame and persevered against unfeasible odds. How could such a prolific idea come so suddenly to cease? Our government would protect us, they objected. We are this country. Without its people this country is nothing. America has always been by the people, for the people. We are this country's primary concern – our safety and our well-being has always been and would always be held foremost by those who overseen us. Well… they were wrong.

I had made it a habit to take shelter inside my own bunker placed strategically under the shed in my backyard. I'd spent months devising the schematics for my own stronghold, should the rumors of nuclear disaster be true. I couldn't play it too safe. After all, during that time of my life there wasn't much occurring to divert my attention elsewhere. I'd lived for this day. Fictional movies and elaborate stories of apocalyptic wonderlands were ingrained into my very being. I lived and breathed in the shadow of catastrophe. I had only myself to speak for, unfortunately, because women didn't appreciate the key elements of my life. To them I was just another geek, a nerd, concerned only with himself and his childish antics. They were not wrong, however; I was obsessed. I had spent every waking minute of my life preparing for the day mankind would viciously and carelessly remove itself from this earth. I was normal, by most standards, though. I worked a full time job and made my contributions to society, a tax-paying individual whose sole purpose was to survive. The desire to survive was present before the bombs fell. Everyday life consisted of working to sustain. Nothing was free and the only way to acquire one's needs was to work for them. My desire was different. I worked, yes, but only to quench my thirst to survive. The money was spent just about as fast as it was earned. My paychecks went towards food rations, medicine, and obviously the completion of my underground safe house. When finished it was a small, twelve foot by twelve foot cube with twenty-four inch thick concrete walls surrounding it. The only way in or out was a ladder in the middle of the room that led up to a foot thick, steel blast-door inside the small garden shed. I was satisfied. After all of the research I had done I knew this would keep me safe from the initial blasts. I didn't live in an area of immediate danger. If bombs were to fall they would only directly hit key locations: large cities, industrial hubs, areas with political significance. I was roughly twenty miles outside of the danger zone. What I didn't account for, though, was what the outside would hold for me once the madness ended. Nothing could have prepared anybody for what would remain of American society.

It was a Saturday. October 23rd, 2077. The sun had just poked its head above the skyline. I awoke inside my concrete catacomb to the sound of thunderous explosions and violent rumbles. The foundation around me convulsed and shrieked as it attempted to withstand the kinetic shock wave caused by the first explosion. Small cracks formed throughout the ceiling and walls enclosed around me. After what seemed like hours the shaking finally stopped. The persistent explosions finally diminished. I looked at my watch to check the time. It had only been two hours from when the bombs began to fall to when the commotion finally subsided. I couldn't believe it was happening. The day I long awaited was here. I turned to the radio which sat menacingly in the corner of the room. When I turned it on all that was heard was faint static and prevalent white noise. Today was the day.

I floated across the room to the small cot I'd used to sleep and fell into it, almost relieved as my head hit the pillow. I knew there was nothing to do but wait. I had enough rations to last me for well-over two years. From what I'd read I was positive I could return to the surface close to a year after the bombs hit. I could have most likely surfaced earlier, but playing it safe seemed to be working in my favor. That first day was mostly a blur. I spent my time sleeping and entertaining myself with makeshift trinkets. The next three-hundred and sixty-four days seemed to crawl by. Every day I grew more and more eager to arise from my concrete cocoon. I engulfed myself in knowledge, surrounding myself in books and literature highlighting nuclear war and various techniques to prevent succumbing to the various obstacles Armageddon would bring. Spending my days learning how to survive and overcome a nuclear disaster, every little detail down to the nail. I made the best of it. There was no room for error. In a world that takes no prisoners I would have to be sure that I was the utmost model of perfection. I had created, in myself, a being driven not only to outlast, but to develop in this time of destruction. In my own mind I was the ultimate tool in survival.

Three hundred and sixty four days, thousands of pages, and millions of mindless, never-ending moments later I was ready. My self-preserved bubble had grown increasingly dull since the beginning of the end and I was anxious to return to what was left of our now inadequate world. It had been exactly one year since the bombs first made contact with our lively, green earth. From what I imagined there was nothing left above; the magnificent towers and standing structures that once made up our flourishing metropolis would be nothing but skeletal remains, empty husks and a reminder of a once-great nation. The beautiful rolling hills and forests that sat, like green seas among us, would be nothing but burning embers and ash, leaving behind nothing but black soot and the smell of burning wood. The oceans that surrounded us and rivers that twisted and winded through an ever-growing landscape would be nothing but exhausted, decaying canals and irradiated bodies of nuclear sludge. The thought festered in my mind as I anxiously prepared myself for the journey to come, my long anticipated trek through a once energetic terrain, now tormented by harsh conditions and progressively perilous disorder. I took a nostalgic look at my chamber and vowed to myself to forget anything that came before the disaster. It was a new world; a less than hospitable world, to say the least, but a new one, nonetheless. With that, I proceeded up the ladder to make my exit and ascend upon the life that waited for me above.

As I placed my hand onto the large, turning mechanism to unseal the door concealing me away for so many days, I hesitated. I looked back into the now darkened abyss that was my home for so long. It was over. I advanced, twisting the large, metal wheel on the door to an open position. With all my strength I pressed my shoulder into the door and pushed, but to no avail. The door was stuck.

* * *

Giselle stood tall, staring out over the arid wilderness that was once a mega-industrial hub. The skyline boasted the desolate carcasses of what used to be triumphant skyscrapers, superficially stabbing the empty sky with their peeked tips. She withdrew a cigarette placed conveniently behind her ear and lit it, watching the demolished city of Detroit as she finished her smoke. She dabbled on the idea of life before, excitingly bolstering her scheme of what life once was. It was nothing now. The world had imploded within itself. Mankind had pulled the strings on the most devastating event in history. She wondered what people thought as the world engaged itself in nuclear annihilation. Were they scared? Confused? What could they have possibly thought about their current situation? Or did they think anything at all? In a time of such crisis, was it possible they just accepted it? Was it possible they had just kneeled to their fate, completely surrendering to being incinerated instantly when the warheads made their mark? She dismissed the idea, flicking her finished cigarette away as she turned for the door.

Her small hut was makeshift. Fastened together by dry, feeble limbs of fallen trees and roofed with dry mud and leaves. However, it was home. She had built it herself, just north of the settlement of Motown. She wasn't much for city life. Ever since she left her vault nearly twenty years ago she hadn't been much for human interaction. People were different now that they were able to be. No longer were individuals restrained to living a life deemed acceptable by society. People were free to live and die however they pleased, be it a life of good or evil. There was still law, rules, and government still existed, but in a different form. This new government did not perturb itself with the well-being of its citizens as it had previously. This new government was a glorified criminal syndicate comprised of only those deadly or assertive enough to take what was theirs, whether it was by force or submission. Led by a man known as Lionel, the city of Detroit, now the settlement of Motown was a den of crime and violence. A place where good men came to perish and the wicked would prosper, feeding off of weakness and deceit.

Giselle had made the decision to separate from the criminal element of the new world. She was bent on surviving and was intent on distancing herself from the cesspool that was Motown. The only good that could come from such a place would be its utter destruction. She was born to parents inside of a Vault and was taught how to live from the radiation soaked lands they were going to be unfortunate enough to be released to live off of. Her parents had died inside the vault, but they had made it a point to ensure their daughter's life would continue in her life after the vault would open. She was lucky enough to have been born inside of a control vault, or otherwise a vault that actually functioned as intended, free of any sort of inhumane experimentation upon the residents; unlike many others, though, who suffered immensely during their stay inside of their own vaults. Vault-Tec was apparently a corporation tasked with seeing that mankind would continue to live after the Great War. Merely a puppet for a sinister organization, Vault-Tec created hundreds of vaults throughout the United States and Canada to perform cruel investigations on unknowing citizens by trial and error. Thousands of those placed into social experimental vaults met their agonizing demise by the hands of Vault-Tec. There were some, however, who were fortunate enough to be located in control vaults. These vaults operated as expected: housing its occupants and shielding and sustaining them during the Great War and the fallout that ensued.

Her usual routine was simple. Days consisted of foraging for scavenged supplies and meager rations of food, nights composed of lonely dreaming and sleeping. The only thing that mattered anymore was survival. If you couldn't survive, you were inadequate: simply prey to the now prevalent existence of raiders and cannibals. She had considered herself a scavenger. Many took the same title for lack of a better one. Day after day she would make her way through the wasteland, with only the clothes on her back, a knapsack for rummaged goods, and the rifle her father had left for her upon his death. She searched endlessly through the ruins of a once-thriving civilization in hopes of finding anything worthwhile. After the Great War most of the world had reduced to primitive living. Her livelihood was anything she could manage, selling various pre-war trinkets and devices to the various travelling merchants of the wastes.

Technology was mostly wiped out after the bombs fell due to the massive electromagnetic pulse charge the bombs possessed upon explosion. Although many rudimentary pieces of technology still existed, there were those who had hopes of returning the world to its former technological age of superiority. Things like radio and television were still available, as long as there were those present to constantly cater to the infinite expenditure of sustaining such things. Some accosted themselves with these tasks, hoping for some sort of alleviation in knowing they essentially assisted mankind with paltry forms of entertainment. There was a man in Motown who took control of the old Fischer building and used it to broadcast radio throughout the region. He was mildly enjoyable, playing jazzy show tunes and catchy ballads, but after a long day of fighting for dear life most chose to tune out due to his incoherent ramblings of a better life and the fight for survival. Television was the same, controlled by the same man, instead showing black and white cartoons of the old days and the same, uninformative news broadcasts from the 21st century.

This particular day had been an exceptionally strenuous one scouring through the old ruins of a small town north of Motown. She'd been there since early that same morning, starting her search through the various decaying buildings that lined the abandoned streets. She saved the largest complex for last. This building seemed to be the most yielding; the others offered little to nothing of value, purely a small amount of water and food rations and a weathered 10mm handgun with a few rounds of ammunition. The pistol would fetch her maybe a hundred caps after a little refurbishing, if she was lucky, and the food and water rations she would stockpile for herself. The front door of the larger complex was locked, so she relocated to a rear entrance which, surprisingly, was advantageously open. She pushed the door open with the barrel of her hunting rifle and peered inside, her mind registering every particle of dust floating aimlessly through the air. The interior was littered with rubble and the remains of what seemed to be a pre-war advertising agency. If she was fortunate enough she hoped to uncover some pre-war technology she could pawn off to a junk merchant: computers, wires, batteries, or generally anything with some sort of possible electrical performance.

She cautiously prowled through the first level of the building, making her way through room after room in her hunt for valuables. The first floor proved fruitless, baring only the empty shells of old computers and empty desks where prideful employees once sat and punched multitudinous combinations of words into their keyboards. She ascended upon the second level via stairway near the front door of the building. As she topped the stairs, she could discern a faint hissing coming from the next room. She gently placed her hand onto the handle of the door and gazed around a small room which she could only recognize as a kitchen. The second floor was much darker than the first. The windows that bordered the first floor apparently hadn't made their way to the second, so the only light that entered the room was the light from the stairwell through a window on the door and a faint glow erecting from another windowed door on the opposite side of the room.

Suddenly, the hissing stopped. She frantically scrutinized the kitchen, desperately attempting to discover the cause of the hissing she had heard just moments before. A shadow darted from the corner of the room and it was gone. She jumped, slightly pulling the door to a mere crack, all the while still peering through the space between the door and frame.

Silence; the room was empty. Confident that it was only her imagination, she brushed through the door and shuddered as it closed behind her, subconsciously doubting the conclusion she'd made prior.

"Hssssssssss…." There it was again. She turned and gasped, face to face with what was once man, now a decayed, rotting corpse still animated. Immediately, she froze, silent and motionless, praying in her mind to whatever God may be listening that this creature would not see her in the darkness. It inched closer, its nose almost touching hers. She could feel it heaving its rancid breath down the front of her chest, drool seeping down the corners of its mouth like blood from a fallen prey.

The ball in her throat swelled as the creature shortened the gap between its face and hers. She knew she would need to act if she wanted to leave with her life. Hands already at her side, she sluggishly reached for the 10mm pistol she had found earlier that was tucked in the front of her pants.

"Die!" The creature lunged, knocking Giselle onto her back as it again darted towards her. She panicked, pulling the pistol and raising it adjacent to the creature's face as it shrieked toward her.

Click. The firing mechanism was jammed. Time seemed to freeze as she watched the creature pounce on top of her, legs wrapped around the sides of her body and swiping furiously at her face with outstretched claws. She covered her face, elbows forward, and rolled to her side, pushing the monster off of her as she quickly jumped to her feet.

The creature rose slowly, mouth agape as it turned its devilish eyes towards her once again. Giselle brought her hands to guard before her face, mentally trying to regain stability or the courage to stave her premature quietus. The creature turned its head, all the while eyes cutting through Giselle like daggers, and in an instant continued its vicious attack. It screamed as it again shot towards her, arms flailing wildly before it as if to snatch the life from her still breathing corpse. She evaded, stepping to the side as the beast foolishly rushed past her, not even realizing she had moved just moments before. She promptly pulled the rifle from around her back and shouldered it, not hesitating even slightly before pulling the trigger.

The brutish demon fell, rotting blood and fragments of deteriorating brain painting the walls and floor around its carcass like a thick, malodorous soup. It wasn't her first encounter with death, but this one appeared all too real. This was enough. Her life wasn't worth a measly few caps in the form of pre-war junk. She turned back, proceeding down the same stairwell she'd taken up and toward the front door of the building. Examining the lock on the large door, she nudged the door it unsuccessfully. She sighed, slinging her rifle around her shoulder and taking a few steps back. Shoulder first, she charged into the mediocre obstruction and burst through the other side, sunlight nearly blinding her as she fell to her knees outside. This wasn't the time to rest. She sprang to a mild jog, en route back home to evaluate her findings and to rejuvenate from her handshake with eternal slumber.

The way home wasn't a treacherous one, but a taxing one. The area that was once a bustling metropolitan filled with dynamic city-goers and obnoxious, annoyed commuters fighting exhaustingly to arrive home to their families had become a xeric terrain. Excruciating heat beamed down from the sun above, charring anything unprotected beneath it. The ground was mostly dirt and gravel, littered with rubbish and debris from the buildings that used to sit on it. The open wastes in the area weren't a real threat. A wanderer might fear encountering an occasional Mole Rat or Bloatfly, but to say the least these creatures weren't a profound threat. Easily disposed, she needn't worry about these minor impediments. It was the Deathclaws and the Yao-Guai that would catch your attention, but these types weren't seen often in the area.

She reached home nearly three hours later. Luckily she hadn't much excitement on the trip back. She was still enervated from her scuffle with the Ghoul hours before and she was hell-bent on making it home without any interference. With a relieved exhale, she dropped her knapsack carelessly on the table and fell into the couch in the middle her one-room shack.

"Goddamn Ghouls…." She confessed, grabbing for the pack of cigarette on the side table beside her. She was somewhat disappointed in how the interaction had played out. This wasn't the first time she had clashed with a Ghoul, but this one nearly took the best of her.

She lit up a cigarette and took a deep drag, cocking back her head as she blew the smoke up into the ceiling. Sighing, she asked, as if to nobody at all, "Why can't anything be _easy_ anymore?"

Days of minimal effort and leisure had long made their departure. Now, everything had a price, and for every price there was a cost.


	2. Chapter 2: A New Beginning

Chapter 2: A New Beginning

"Wha- No! No! No! Come on!" I panicked, thrusting my frail shoulder repeatedly into the steel blast door, the only preventing factor between myself and the world beyond.

"This isn't happening! Open, you mother fucker! _OPEN_!" I screamed, desperately clinging to the revolving wheel that once intended to open the door that was now separating me from the very thing I had anticipated for a long, anxious year. "Why won't you _fucking_ open?!"

Angrily, I bashed the metal door with a barrage of clenched fists, teeth clamped and squeaking as my fists throbbed and bled from the absent-thought assault. Relentlessly I pounded at the door for what seemed like hours, eventually pulling myself away from the ladder that held me up and back down to the miserable cot in which I'd spent my last three-hundred and sixty-five nights.

"This is a dream. This can't be real. You're going to wake up. This can't be real," I desperately reassured myself.

I was lying. The aching pain in my battered knuckles was a clear indicator of that.

* * *

The walls of her sheet metal shack had grown dull. She needed no reminder that she had overstayed. A year was long enough. Even though, nowadays, where you live or what you live in was irrelevant – the only determining qualities in one's choice of abode being its ability to shelter you and keep you warm, and even though the hut she had assembled did mediocre enough jobs of both – she was ready for a change. While the simple thought behind it was pointless, even too risky while bearing little reward, there was an undeniable variable that insisted she move on.

After spending her first twenty years in Vault 7 and her last two surviving in the wastes, she had developed a desire for change. She wouldn't ponder on life before the vaults, the radiation, and the Ghouls anymore. She decided now, that it would only hinder her in the long run. From here on out, everything was about tomorrow. Before, when she lived in a world which consisted of constant reminders of the past, she hadn't had any aspiration to move. She was content remaining dormant, able to reminisce on the past and the present. She wasn't anymore.

Her encounter with a Ghoul the day prior had perturbed Giselle a great deal more than she had first anticipated. Aside from her physical wounds, as if various gashes down the back sides of your arms weren't enough, the creature had taken an unexpected mental toll on her. It sparked a feeling of unrest within her; a newfound will to change, to be better. Over the past two years she had maintained herself in the Wasteland haphazardly, barely scraping by to exist another day, likely to fall by the likes of Ghouls or Yao-Guai eventually. It was just a matter of time. She was confident in her own abilities unquestionably, but there was no denying she needed to improve. If she didn't, sooner or later, she would end up an extravagant feast for a pack of ghouls.

Her physical wounds had been left unattended for the night, and if she prolonged the effort any further, it may have ended up costing her an arm. She sat up in her bed, stretching her legs beneath the thin, holey sheet outstretched over her lower-half, while simultaneously trying to stretch her arms above her head. Instead, she winced in pain from the deep cuts on the back side of her arms stretching with her. With that, she swung her legs off the side of the creaking mattress and rose, yawning as she moved a shaking hand over her widening mouth.

Giselle sidled over to the table where her knapsack lay, half open and spilling some of its belongings off of the table where it sat and onto the floor. She sighed while bending over to collect what had fallen and placing it back onto the table, before digging through her bag and producing a Stimpak and a bottle of cheap, pre-war vodka. Placing the items down on the table, she moved over to a charred dresser sitting across from her cot and pulled out two old t-shirts from within, then returned to her place beside the table. She chortled, grabbing the bottle of vodka and lifting it before her eyes and with a sadistic grin. After unscrewing the cap and carelessly knocking back an elongated swig, she turned the bottle upside down and directed it at the wounds on the arm opposite the one she held the bottle with. She bit down into her lip, squinting her eyes and masking a quiet grunt before switching hands and repeating the same process on the other arm. With the sterilization complete, the reason for dousing her wounds thoroughly in alcohol, she tied a t-shirt around each of her arms.

She sat for a moment, eyes fixed on the floor with her elbows planted firmly against her knees as she leaned forward in her chair. Where could she go from here? This incessant need that had roared to life inside of her was unrelenting and unforgiving. After spending so long frozen in place, and with the overwhelming thought of dying a random Wastelander, she protested the idea of allowing herself to succumb to this world without first leaving her mark. This world would remember her face, and would exalt her as the hero of the Wastes.

Without a further thought into the matter, she grabbed her hunting rifle and her combat knife, filled her knapsack with as many rations of food and clean water as she could manage, a few Stimpaks, Rad-X's, and Rad-A-Ways, a handful of spare .308 rounds, two Stealthboys, a doctor's bag, her Pip-Boy, and her reading glasses, and sprang to her feet enthusiastically. Starting for the door, she peered around her mud shack one final time, nostalgia setting in.

This would be the last time she spent a sleepless night inside of these frail walls. From here on out, she didn't really know where she would sleep. All she knew was the road forward, and she was willing to follow it wherever it went, even if that meant not sleeping at all. It had taken Giselle over twenty years, but she had finally figured out her purpose in this life. Too many nights spent questioning her own existence had helped her reach this point, and there was no turning back. Inside of her, a chain of events had begun that would not cease until they ran their course.

Thrusting her arms into the wooden door of her shack she advanced through the opening, shielding her eyes with her forearm as she moved out into the open air. The world around her, which was all too familiar, was now being seen in a different light. Before her untimely ultimatum, it was simply the place where she lived. There was no significance to an empty lot twenty-or-so miles north of Motown, especially one hidden away from anybody or anything intelligent. This had been her own slice of solitude: her only escape after long days battling the weather, terrain, and the wild beasts and raiders that lay claim to the surrounding territories. Her scenic retreat no longer sufficed, though, as her new lifestyle would obligate her to travel and move, to never remain idle for more than awhile.

Giselle looked around her, eyes scanning the spontaneous, punitive terrain. Her small encampment had been set up just off of the main road leading into Motown. It was conveniently tucked under a buckled overpass and generally hidden from plain sight. She reached into her knapsack and withdrew her Pip-Boy, latching it around her left wrist and pressing a combination of buttons to initiate the device.

The screen filled with life and color, making various beeping noises as the processors within whirled to life. She navigated through the device's various menus and selected a tab for the local map, making a mental note in which direction she would head first. She was about fifteen miles north of Motown and at the right pace, she could arrive at the front gates in less than two days. She knew she didn't have enough supplies to endure the journey, so she would have to stop off somewhere in between to gather enough food and water rations to fare the remainder of the journey. There were a few places of interest that she regarded, deciding she would investigate each area first before making her decision as to which one she would explore.

First on her list was the Lakeside Mall, a massive hub of retail stores and fast food chains. There were bound to be some type of residual supplies there. Next, there was the National Guard Armory located about half way between her current position and Motown. She couldn't guarantee specifically what she was looking for, in this case food and water rations, would be found here, but there was a chance, and an even higher likelihood of stumbling across some old tech abandoned within the confines of this old military armament supply. Lastly, there was the Bazaar. The Bazaar was different, though. The Bazaar was what was left of the Russell Bazaar, which was a pre-war swap meet, modeled after eastern style bazaars, and located in an old industrial complex. Before the war, this was a spectacular place to find _anything_ , however, after the war and the fallout settled, the place was overrun by con artists and junk merchants looking to make an easy buck. She may not be able to rifle through old rubble in search for what she needed here, but she could trade a few trinkets that she had collected the day before at the Bazaar for a moderate price, which would buy her a sufficient amount of food to nourish her for the rest of her expedition. She entered the coordinates for the abandoned mall into the Pip-Boy on her wrist and progressed into the direction it led her, extracting a cigarette from the damaged pack in her front pants pocket and lighting it in one smooth motion while continuing on tempo towards her destination.

Six hours later, Giselle arrived at the abandoned mall. It was surrounded in barren parking lots, cracking throughout by years of platonic shifting and overgrown with sporadic weeds that managed to break their way through the surface of the concrete from beneath. She sauntered across the smoldering parking lot, feeling the sun baking the back of her neck as she traversed. It had reached mid-day and the sun reached its highest point in the sky, evident from the beating heat waves cooking anything below. As she inched closer and closer to a set of entrance doors on the south side of the building she winced, noticing an existing presence of raiders already picking their way through a store inside. She counted four of them, but she knew they tend to travel in groups much bigger than this so she heeded caution. There was a chance she had stumbled across a scouting or scavenging party that belonged to a larger group of raiders elsewhere, but there was no way of knowing for certain, and the only way to find out would be to confront them. She decided then that her best option was to circle around the mall and enter from the opposite side and postpone the firefight until she was certain of their numbers.

She followed along the outer wall of the massive edifice, circling her way around to the north side of the structure. She approached a multitude of sets of glass double doors that made up the north side entrance way and peeked through one, scanning the visible area for any sign of raiders. The opening behind the doors created a linear hallway that lead back into the main section of the mall. Part of the roof had caved in, leaving broken chunks of concrete and metal scattered sporadically across the floor. She pulled on the handle of one of the doors, feeling no play as she increased the strength in her tug. The door refused to budge, as if it was mocking her. She tried the remaining doors to no avail, frustrated as she grabbed ahold of a piece of concrete from the ground. Without thinking, she lobbed the piece of fragmented cement through one of the glass doors. The glass shrieked obnoxiously as it fell to the floor in a shattered pile. Giselle waited, anticipating that the noise would have raised the suspicion of any raiders inside, had there been any. After a few prolonged moments, she carefully stepped through the large hole that used to be a glass door and plopped her foot onto the ground on the other side. Glass crunched under her boot as she entered the hallway, eyes wandering and viewing the destruction around her.

The stores inside had been looted long ago, most likely before the Great War. All that was left were the speckled leftovers of what was ignored, however this could potentially be a promising sign. Before the two hour war that wiped out mankind and after those who were chosen or paid to be protected in Vaults, the majority of those who stayed behind took to the streets, pillaging and raiding anything that wasn't locked or tied down. Even though it mattered little, because today these people are charred heaps lying motionless or a mound of human ash, they had reverted back to their primal stages. Chaos brought out the worst in people, but the thought of an untimely and agonizing death brought out the devil in them. The difference was, though, that people then wouldn't have the same needs as the people would now. Then, one might consider a new television or game system a necessity, completely neglecting the treasures one would relish today. She was sure there would be left over food and water rations inside, somewhere.

She continued down the hallway, promenading herself past the various abandoned shops and restaurants on either side of her. At the end of the corridor she reached a large opening with two identical hallways to hers spanning in two separate directions. The mall had been designed into the shape of a large circle in the center, with three large hallways leading to the center of the mall from the outside. Large department stores sat on each side of the hallways, offering their own separate entrances to the mall and closing any empty space between the end of the hallway and where the center of the mall began.

Her gaze moved throughout the large open space before her as she neared the end of her passage. She stood, awe-struck, and her eyes moved furiously in different directions, rifling frantically for an indication of raider presence. In the middle of the open span was a collection of rusting metal chairs and tables strewn carelessly into a hazardous mess. There was a small coffee stand standing beside the muddle of furniture, overlooking what remained of the shop's seating arrangement. Old, velvet rope fences that used to surround the area had been knocked over and disregarded, probably years before by a cavalier looter on a mission. The second floor terrace of the shopping mall had mostly collapsed, leaving any stores located there unreachable without a fervent effort.

Quietly, she floated past the inanimate disarray, stepping slowly towards the center of the open expanse. Her head turned in circles as she ventured closer, eyes fluttering wildly to comb over the debris for any straggling raiders. As she loomed closer, indistinguishable arguing reverberated from one of the remaining two unexplored hallways. She took cover behind the aging coffee stand, inching her gaze over the counter towards the root of the voices. Silently she waited, anxious to advance and continue her search, but cautious and matured enough to make sure to play it safe. Just as the thought passed through her mind again, the faint sound of footsteps resounded from the same hallway. Moments later, a group of seven raiders rounded the corner and became visible. There were three more than she had counted initially.

The leathered up goons clambered ungainly together in their group, while continuing to maintain their synchronized progression. Peeking through various scattered piles of refuse and litter, they advanced past where Giselle remained hidden and moved towards the opposite hallway Giselle had just entered from. She knew they would see the broken glass and hoped they wouldn't put two-and-two together. She slipped around the stand she had initially ducked behind and rose to her feet, again scanning the environment with her eyes, searching for a store that might have what she needed. At the end of the third hallway, opposite the one she entered and almost adjacent to the one where the raiders originated, she could barely make out the sign that read " _Atom Burger_ ". Grinning to herself triumphantly, she pushed forward towards the final remaining hallway.

As she approached the end of the hallway, she could see the area where the _Atom Burger_ store resided was a food court at one point in time. She perceived the numerous chain restaurants around her, each serving their own respective taste of cuisine. There was _Atom Burger_ , _Taco Bomb_ , _NFC_ ( _Nuka Fried Chicken)_ , _A Cuppa Joe_ , and the list went on. Giselle marveled at the array of options surrounding her, head spinning as she twirled in a circle to take in the various possibilities of food she may soon scavenge.

There was no time to waste, and none went wasted, because any moment the group of raiders she had encountered on her way in may come sauntering down this hallway. Starting with Atom Burger, Giselle vaulted over the front counter and speedily began tearing through the remnants behind it. Unfortunately, after a few moments of thorough rummaging, she had only recovered a box of Sugar Bombs and two purified water bottles from somebody's personal locker. There was plenty of food, but regrettably it wasn't sealed and had gone bad a long, long time ago.

Without a moment to spare, she leaped back over the front counter of _Atom Burger_ and moved on to the neighboring store, _A Cuppa Joe_. Again, after meticulous scrutinizing, she came up empty handed; aside from two bags of coffee beans she may be able to catch a good price for at the Bazaar. That left two stores, _NFC_ and _Taco Bomb_ , and Giselle spared no time in perusing through what remained of them. As she wrapped up her investigation through the kitchen of Taco Bomb, she caught a glimpse of a straggling raider making his way through the center of the food court. Instinctively she dropped behind the counter, again peeking over it and maintaining a concentrated gaze on the lonely raider. She watched as he aimlessly dawdled through the empty corridor, seemingly staring down at his feet as he almost danced through the open room.

With her search finished, and the realization that finding salvageable rations may be harder than it seemed, she was eager to make her leave. She knew there was plenty more to find here, but with the substantial raider manifestation she knew it would have to wait. She could always come back and avoid the risk of fighting seven men on her own. Hoping for a clean exit, she cursed under her breath as the raider changed course into her direction. She watched carefully, staying low not to give away her position, and followed the man with her eyes as he slowly arrived at the opposite side of the front counter. Giselle slowly moved her hand to her hip and unsheathed her combat knife, knuckles white as she firmly grasped the leather handle of the weapon. It felt heavy in her hand. She contemplated her next move, anxiously waiting for the man to look over the counter and discover her hiding there. She decided not to give him the opportunity,

In one fluid motion, she sprang to her feet and attempted to hook the knife under the jaw of the raider, but to no avail. He caught her wrist with his burly hand, firmly holding her arm in place as he wrestled the blade from her clutch. With a devilish smile, he spoke,

"The boys are gonna' have some fun with you, little girl."

* * *

 **Author's Notes:**

So, after a few weeks struggling with where to go for the second chapter (because I write all of my stuff "freestyle", if you will, as motivation and ideas comes to me), I noticed I gained one follower and a favorite. I decided, rightfully, that you, my friend, deserve this second chapter! So, when I got to work this morning I nutted up and pelted it out for you. My thanks goes to my first follower and favorite, BluMageXL, and I look forward to writing and releasing more for yours and anybody else's enjoyment! - R Hancock


	3. Chapter 3: The Way Forward

Chapter 3: The Way Forward

"Get your f-..." Giselle despairingly made attempts at wrestling her arm free of her attacker's grasp, "Get the fuck off!"

"Settle down, bitch." The raider demanded, swiftly bringing the back side of his hand across Giselle's profile.

She buckled slightly, dropping her weight into the counter before her as the raider pulled her slumped figure over to his side of the bar. With an annoyed heave, the raider threw Giselle over his shoulder and turned on his heel, proceeding back down the hallway to the central hub of the mall.

Propped carelessly over the raider's shoulder, Giselle's shuddering eyes wander across the floor, vision blackening further by the second. She hoped to find something she could use to thwart the man dragging her away. This was her last chance to defend herself before she would be taken back to his group where they would perform ungodly atrocities against her. Swaying side to side on his back as the raider marched dutifully back to his men, Giselle's gaze moved along his beltline. She could barely make out the outline of the sheathed knife on his belt, as if conveniently placed there for her, as she outstretched her hand for it. Wrapping her shaking hand around the firm handle of the blade, she winced as she pulled it from its casing. Just as the raider turned to realize his blade had been removed, she drove the blade into the small of his back, erecting an agonizing scowl from the pitiless marauder.

The man crashed to his knees, blood spurting out of the wound on his back as Giselle cleanly ripped the knife back out, still slumped awkwardly over the man's shoulders. She positioned her weight into her upper body and flipped over the man's back, quickly jumping back to her feet as she hit the floor. She stumbled back, still not fully recovered from her brief episodes of losing consciousness, and caught herself against a stone pillar which once held up the second floor rotunda that was now only rubble at her feet. She looked up, not a moment too late, as a massive chunk of concrete fell from the caving roof above her. With a swift step to the side as the mass came plummeting to the floor and burst into a thousand fragments of distorted rock, she could feel her body strengthen and regain its composure. Eyes fixed on the cursing man before her; she clenched and rolled the handle of the stolen blade in her hands. The man's blood was now running down the length of the blade and into the palm of her hand. Scowling and clawing at his back, the man remained on his knees, blood forming a gloppy pool around him.

She cocked her arm back over her shoulder and whipped it forward, sending the whirling knife straight into the man's throat. He gasped for air as Giselle tore the blade back out, impetuously clawing at the gushing wound on his neck. With a last breath, the man fizzled to the floor and died with a twitch of his leg.

Giselle readied herself, unslinging her hunting rifle and aiming it further down the hallway leading back to the main circle of the mall. Standing, waiting, hoping a flurry of raiders came barreling down the corridor, she eagerly held her mark. After a few lengthy moments with no pursuing combatants, she hurried herself as she checked to make sure she still had her knapsack on her back. After finding it still in place, she darted back for the exit doors at the end of the hallway nearest the old food court.

Without looking back, and her hunting rifle in hands, she slams the butt of her weapon into the glass door. As it exploded into a razor-sharp jumble on the floor, she burst through the door frame, turning to again fix her aim into the mall and down the corridor to neutralize any pursuant. This time, she wasn't as fortunate. The remaining group of raiders she had encountered on her way into the mall surged forth from the hallway, discovering their dead friends and immediately convicting her of the crime. They scattered, each running into a different direction, but Giselle had managed to pick two of them off as they first approached. With the dwindling number of raiders, now only four, her confidence in overcoming this situation peaked. Reloading five more .308 rounds into the chamber, she searched the ravaged food court for the enduring four raiders. Two took cover in the _Taco Bomb_ restaurant where she had first taken cover, ironic, one more leaning against a pillar near the hallway and rear of the food court, and the final one ducked low behind an overturned table in the middle of the chaotic array of dining furniture in the center of the court.

Apparently they weren't professionals, because they had left themselves wide open for a full on frontal assault. She snickered to herself before firing two rounds on the first man ducked pointlessly behind a table. The .308 rounds ruptured the surface of the table and continued path directly into the man's form, one tearing through his leather armor and planting itself in his stomach, and the other blowing clean through his eye socket. He fell to the floor instantly, and she moved her aim towards the enemy leaning cautiously behind the stone pillar. Just as she fired her third round and dropped the peeking raider as he carelessly leaned his head out to monitor the situation, the lasting two raiders erupted from their cover behind the kitchen and front counter of _Taco Bomb_. Perfect.

Anticipating their moves, she had already turned her mark toward the emerging two raiders, dropping them each with a single bullet to the head promptly as they leapt from their cover.

"Fucking goons," She scoffed, wiping her forehead with the back of her head, and unknowingly smearing some of the first kill's blood across her forehead as she started back into the mall to loot her casualties.

All in all the situation had proved fruitful, Giselle having recovered three boxes of _Instamash_ , two boxes of _Fancy Lad Snack Cakes_ , two boxes of _BlamCo Mac and Cheese_ , and five purified water bottles from the raiders, two bags of dried coffee beans from _A Cuppa Joe_ , and a box of _Sugar Bombs_ and two water bottles from the _Atom Burger_ store. Satisfied with her findings, she again made her leave through the busted door frame and stood tall in the diminishing sunlight. It was becoming dusk and the sun had begun to set within the western horizon. Reaching around her back, she withdrew a bottle of purified water from her pack and twisted off the cap, swigging the warm liquid thoughtlessly. Between taking deep swigs and spitting out spurts of the water, she indulged herself in the room-temperature water: a luxury taken for granted so long ago.

* * *

I paced anxiously around the outskirts of my homemade prison, fingers dragging across the jagged walls as I circled endlessly. It felt like it had been weeks since I discovered my fate, and as time went on it only became more distorted. I needed to figure out an escape before it was too late. I had preserved enough food, water, and medicine to keep me alive for a hundred years, but it wasn't starvation, thirst, or sickness that I feared. It was the thought of spending eternity or dying cold and alone, in this tiny space. The notion of wasting away, day after day, slowly losing my sanity and resorting to the primal beast every human was beneath their core. I peered around my dimly lit cell, absorbing every small detail, every crack in the wall, and rummaged through the many possibilities in my mind.

What if I kept trying the door? Maybe something fell on top of it and I could work my way free. What if I waited? I have enough food to last me a life time, and for all I knew anyway I would reach the surface and have to turn back around due to unlivable conditions on the surface. The world was probably soaked to its core in radiation. Crops, water, everything had to have been infested with it. What if I was wrong, though? What if humans had prevailed? What if the world outside was persevering through nuclear holocaust while I was locked away under the ground on which they walked?

Thousands of different scenarios ran through my head, but none of them could reassure me enough to prevent me from devising an escape plan. I would either exit this prison or lose my mind trying, and at this point, neither outcome seemed undesirable. At least if I was mad I could flourish in these conditions. Mad men only need themselves to talk to. I could wait and ramble to myself, for infinity, until the day came where I exhaled my last breath. That didn't seem too bad, but the thought of a life above trumped it unquestionably. Nothing would stop me from trying.

Hours, or maybe days later, after all of my plans had failed unequivocally and the door remained unyielding, I gave up. My strength was lost, and if I wanted any hope of continuing my vain pursuit of freedom, I needed rest and nourishment. I moseyed back to my cot and fell into it, gritting my teeth as the creaking bed posts adjusted under my weight. There has to be a way out of here, I promised myself while nibbling on a _Fancy Lad Snack Cake_. Washing the snack cake down with a few chugs of water, I wiped my lips with the back of my wrist and released a rejuvenating sigh.

After finishing my portioned rations, subsequently giving myself the energy I would need to persist in my task, I laid my head back into the pillow on my cot. I kicked my feet up onto the railing at the end of the small bed and crossed them, bouncing my left foot slightly under my right. I may as well read for a bit before picking back up where I had left off. Reading was always my way of passing the time, and I had a collection of literature that even the scholars of old would envy. I grabbed an old newspaper off of the stack on the floor beside my cot and folded it open, my eyes tracing each line methodically as I began reading through the first article. _Nuclear Energy Is the Future_ was the title, and it explained the many different, practical uses for nuclear energy versus burning fossil fuels, as man had done since as long as anybody could remember. It was an interesting read, but I soon grew bored of it and switched to a novel I had brought and anxiously intended to read. I had brought enough to last me a year, and my only means for light was the battery operated lantern and enough batteries to last… a little over a year.

Just then, the lantern died, and the room plunged into a thick black.

* * *

After finding enough of what she lacked at the mall, Giselle was ready to continue her escapade towards Motown. She still had roughly a ten mile journey ahead of her until she reached her destination, but the sun was falling and the moon was rising, and the wasteland became an entirely different place under the cover of night. She knew she needed to seek shelter, and fast.

She followed the one road that remained, which was no longer pavement, but dirt packed flat and neatly under the boots of fellow travelers. After walking what she logged as two miles on her Pip-Boy, she stumbled across what she could only decipher as a settlement, and judging by the map she was following, it had to be The Heights.

From the outside, this particular colony seemed well off. The entire camp was surrounded by a chain link fence, and from the looks of it they had managed to electrify it. The surrounding fence only lead to one entrance, a sectioned off gate where two guards stood watch outside, assault rifles at the ready against their shoulders. This place seemed as good as any to settle down and rest for the night, especially because it was an easy choice between a protected town and another one room shack on the side of the road. It really seemed like a decision that made itself.

Giselle prudently neared closer to the gate, hands in clear view to avoid alerting any unwanted attention from the armed guards. With outstretched arms placed nonchalantly at her side, she sauntered up to the gate and stood merely inches away from it, shooting the guards a chipper smile.

"How's the weather in there, fellas? Any different from out here?" she chimed, lively.

"No different than out there. What do you want?" one of the guards answered in a male voice, slightly muffled beneath his protective face mask. Giselle could easily recognize that he was all business.

"A place to sleep for the night would be nice," she retorted, her facial expression turning grim. "There isn't much variety out here when it comes to places to sleep."

"You know how many people come through here looking for shelter, girl? What makes you so special?" the second guard piped up, her voice deep and burly.

"Well, I wouldn't say special, but I do have caps. Everybody takes caps, right?" she replied. "How's about a hundred for each of you and we call it a day?"

"If only it were that easy," the female guard countered. "We're both paid by the hour and have strict orders, so your caps are useless here."

"You think you're the first person to offer us caps, lady?" the other guard quipped, cocking his head back and cackling.

"Instead of borderline insulting me, why don't you tell me what I need to do to get in there?" she remarked dryly. Her demeanor had grown tired and annoyed, and she was blatantly fed up with the two's antics.

"I thought we already made this clear? Nobody gets in. Doesn't matter what your pathetic reason is, or how many caps you have: nobody gets through this gate," the male guard declared, hands noticeably taking a more firm hold on the butt of his weapon.

Just as the brawny male finished his sentence, a hideous creature erupted from the shadows, baring razor sharp teeth that protruded from its misaligned jaws while standing on its two hind legs. Its fur was mangy and only existed in oddly shaped clumps splotching the mid-sized canine-looking beast's gristly skin. It screeched, almost in a terrifying howl, and charged directly at Giselle standing idle in front of the gate, still confused and unprepared for the situation.

Stepping forward, the male guard aimed his automatic assault rifle at the assailing animal and emptied half of his thirty round magazine, barraging it with bullets and stopping it in its tracks. While the animal lay dying on the ground, wheezing slightly as its starved belly puffed in and out, the man stepped forward and withdrew a pistol from the holster on his side. Offering the expiring creature no time to make a final stand, the man put two finishing rounds into its head and holstered his sidearm. Wiping his gloved hands together, he returned his attention to Giselle, eyes forthright with irritation.

"As you can see, we have enough problems that need our attention. We don't need to worry about some lost Vaultie who _clearly_ cannot fend for herself," the male asserted, sizing her up concurrently.

Giselle had grown noticeably exasperated and the look of confusion still haunted her sweat-glistening face in the now prominent moonlight.

"I'm not going to sit here and explain to you the many fallacies in your judgement because you _clearly_ ," she mocked, grinning sarcastically while moving her weathered lips, "lack an education. I need a place to sleep, now, and it seems like you have a problem that you don't know how to take care of. Who's in charge here?"

Sneering, the female guard stepped forward, "Sterling."

"Take me to him," Giselle instructed, hands now on her slender hips with her weight shifted onto her left leg.

The two guards, slightly baffled at Giselle's tenacity, but more by her determination, stood for a moment, staring at each other almost in disbelief, before stepping aside and using a remote controlled button to open the gate. The chain-link doors swung open and Giselle stayed for a moment, watching the two guards and awaiting their next move.

"You gonna stand here all night?" the male probed, as if provoking her into another quarrel. "Or was that your entire plan? Get us to open the gates and then stand here like an idiot while all of the Wolvies invade our camp."

Promenading through the gate, Giselle turned as she reached the other side and as the gates swung back to a close. The guards turned back to their position, facing forward and eyes alert for any threats compromising the gate.

"Wolvies?" she inquired, eyes squinted into a dubious mien.

"Go talk to Sterling," the female guard rejoined, neglecting to turn to acknowledge Giselle. "He's at the police station."

She wouldn't question, instead spinning around heading for what could only be distinguished as a police station. Stopping momentarily, she shrugs off her knapsack and sets it down, reaching in and extracting a crumpled pack of cigarette. Pulling the last one from the small carton, she stuffs it loosely between her lips and lights it. Poking her arms back through the straps her sack she continues towards the station, cigarette dangling lazily from her mouth as she takes gradual draws. As she arrives at the front steps of the police station, a dapper gentleman in a wrinkled suit emerges from the double-doors to the building, arms erect above his head where a black top-hat sat.

"So you're the one Lotus informed me about?" he queried, an animated smile plastered across his rubbery, aged skin. "Do you have a name, my dear?"

"Gis- Elle. You can call me Elle," she ordained, deriving an amused semblance from Sterling. "And that must make you Sterling."

"Very right, my dear!" he exclaimed, causing Giselle to startle vaguely. "And I have a proposition for you."

"This must be related to those things outside," Giselle conveyed, finishing the last drag from her cigarette and carelessly tossing it aside. "Wolvies, I think one of yours called them?"

"Precisely! Wolvies, the aftermath of a mad doctor's experiments with the extinct Wolverine genome and the infamous FEV," he retorted, his face as energetic as ever.

"FEV? I'm not familiar with… that," Giselle uttered, seemingly disappointed with her lack of knowledge on the subject.

"The forced evolutionary virus, or FEV. It's a chemical that rapidly hastens the evolutionary process. There was a doctor here, one of our previous residents. His name was Dr. Merrigold. He was our resident doctor, and a very good one, but he had another agenda. He was ultimately obsessed with cloning and resurrecting a species of Wolverines," Sterling explained, his eternal beam fading to a concerned state. "We thought nothing of it, because it seemed harmless enough, but he had another plan that remained unspoken until he was successful. After successfully replicating the Wolverine DNA and RNA, he began trials with introducing the FEV virus to his clones in an abandoned laboratory outside of town. After a chemical accident, which most believe was caused by the Wolverines' increased intelligence and strength, Dr. Merrigold's lab was overrun by the beasts and we assume they maimed him alive, but nobody knows. His radio went silent a week or two ago and nobody has heard from him since."

She didn't need to hear any more, already concluding his request in her head.

"So you want me to go to his lab and find out?" she bantered, almost rolling her eyes in an act of displeasure.

"And don't forget to destroy all of the Wolvies," Sterling added, his veneer again reverting back to his vivacious grin.

Right. Kill all of the Wolvies. How could she forget?


	4. Chapter 4: Doctor's Orders

Chapter Four: Doctor's Orders

"So what you're telling me is that you'd like me to go alone, into an abandoned laboratory that is _crawling_ with mutated wolverines?" Giselle questioned, doubtfully.

Sterling fluttered, from excitement or anxiety she didn't know, and inched closer to her while speaking in a whispered tone, "That is exactly what I'm telling you, Miss Elle, and if I do say so myself, as hesitant as you are, you will complete the task that I've given you?"

Giselle sighed, moving her hand across her forehead and her fingers through the bangs of her oily hair. She wasn't exactly enthusiastic about it, but if she wanted a place to sleep for the night, and even a safeguard to return to in the future, she was obligated to abide.

"Fine, you got me. I'm not making any promises, though. If it gets too ugly, I'm gone," Giselle affirmed while grabbing the purified water bottle out of her bag from a few hours earlier. She polished the remainder of the bottle off after a few swigs and stuffed the empty bottle back in her sack, grazing over the many possible uses for an empty water bottle in her head.

Waiting, and watching, for her to finish her drink, Sterling removed a rusting key from the inner pocket of his suit jacket. After Giselle finished her drink, he handed her the key with the same broad smile as usual.

"Your room will be cell A-7. It's the first corridor once you've found yourself in the holding cell area of the station, and the last cell at the end of the hall. You'll find sheets, a pillow, and a wardrobe to store your things. Make sure you lock up whenever you leave if you'd like to make sure none of your things to… disappear, if you will," Sterling finished before patting Giselle on the shoulder and spinning around to proceed back into the police station.

 _We sleep in a jail cell?_ she thought to herself. The concept seemed foreign and, for some reason, it made her uncomfortable. Nonetheless, she followed after Sterling a few moments later, pushing her way through the double doors that made up the entrance to the police station. As she entered the decaying lobby, she absorbed all of her surroundings. The worn desk where a dispatcher probably used to sit, receiving an endless amount of emergency phone calls from distressed civilians. The distorted, barely legible posters littering the wall, some torn and hanging loosely from their bonds, advertising safe ways of living and crime prevention slogans. Chairs sat menacingly in the center of the lobby, still aligned perfectly in rows where detainees and lawbreakers from the past would sit and stir and resist the uniformed constabularies that wished to imprison them.

With a shake of her head, Giselle continued through the lobby and into a hallway which lead to three rooms and another hallway at the end. _Kitchen, armory, and office_ , she reads to herself from the signs above each door. She moved past each room, taking a momentary glance inside as she does, and reached the end of the hallway only to advance down the next hallway, which has a sign at the end reading "Holding Cells". She nodded to herself, acknowledging the sign directing her to her abode, and progressed down the hall until she arrived at the corridor spoken of by Sterling. She counted two more corridors, labeled "B" and "C", two more rows of seven homes for fourteen lucky people, but kept to her corridor and found her cell at the very end.

Pushing her key into the lock, she turned the key forcefully and hearing a clicking motion inside of the locking mechanism, slid the gate to the side. She stirred the large black curtain to the side that shielded the inside of the cell and entered, shifting her gaze between the two lonesome pieces of furniture inside of the musty six by nine cell. A dusty wardrobe, a cot, and a small, confined space; she was beginning to think this journey may have been redundant. This was the exact thing she was frantically trying to escape. She pulled open the wardrobe and placed her knapsack inside along with her rifle.

Reluctantly, she unzipped her leather torso and shrugged out of it, draping it neatly over the foot of her bed. After undoing her belt and pulling it out from the loops, making sure to remove her sheathed blade from its position fastened to her belt and tossing it onto her bed, she unbuttoned her cargo pants at the groin, untied her combat boots and yanked each of them off before stepping out of her pants. She gently folded her bottoms and belt over the foot of the bed with her leather body. Standing exposed in a black tank-top and her undergarments, she sighed before fixing her eyes back onto her shoddy sleeping arrangement. A sense of hopelessness ran through her as she grabbed her knife and collapsed onto her beaten cot, wincing as the springs pressed rigidly into her back. She concealed the sheathed blade under her pillow before rolling onto her side, wrapping her arm around her pillow from underneath and maintaining it underneath her crooked neck.

She laid there for a moment, pondering, thinking, interrogating herself to remember the reason she left home no more than a day prior. For a second she seemed to have lost it after finding herself again in the same conditions that she had grown to loath. After all the calculated risks, and especially the uncalculated ones, like the mall incident, she incessantly found herself back to where she started. Except now she was in an unfamiliar place surrounded by unfamiliar people, and employed by the likes of a Wastelander in a shabby suit. Why did he wear a suit, anyway? What was the point? It seemed impractical in every sense other than a manipulative one. Was it a bush-league attempt at coming off as intelligent, or capable? Or was it a conscious effort to subliminally condescend the rest of the citizens? From all perspectives Sterling seemed genuine, and the settlement he governed was irrefutable testimony of his righteous intentions, but she knew that there are two sides to every coin.

Realizing that she had dwelled on the subject too long and was most likely overanalyzing the situation, she drove the thought from her mind. She reassured herself that this place and her new quarters were only temporary, supporting the idea with thoughts of continuing her journey the next day. With that, she found comfort, and slowly dozed off behind a confident smirk.

The next day, Giselle awoke with an enthusiastic yawn, spreading her arms out above her head for a morning stretch. The flurry of gashes on the back sides of her forearms had been healing, rendering the movement in her arms no longer strenuous. She turned her head from side to side, peering around the dank cell walls around her. It felt like midday, but she didn't know how long she had slept and couldn't tell due to the lack of windows. Her intuition told her that she had slept awhile. Sitting up from where she lay, she grabbed her knife from under her pillow and kicked her feet over the side of the bed, briefly spinning her torso from side to side with her hands planted firmly against the small of her back to work out the kinks from a long rest on a hundred year old spring mattress.

Rising to her feet, she routinely strapped herself back into her leather torso and pulled on her cargo pants, fixing her blade to her belt as she tightened it around her waist. She stuffed her feet into her combat boots, hastily tying the laces and straightening her back with a strained grunt. The tension had been building in her lower back from the distance and time spent walking the past couple of days. She shuffled over to the wardrobe where her belongings were stored and drew open the doors, slinging her sack around her shoulder and the same with her rifle. Her stomach growled as she exited her cell, neglecting to lock the gate with the intention of returning the key to Sterling and leaving the Heights altogether after finishing this assignment for compensation. The deal itself seemed a little lopsided: a precarious suicide mission into a mad man's radioactive lair for one night in a fusty cell on an ancient mattress. Who was she to complain, though? Without this disproportionate deal, she wouldn't have survived the night.

She navigated through the winding hallways back to the room labeled _Office_ and knocked, pushing through the door after a muffled "Come in!" emanated from the other side. There, sat behind a desk cluttered with old world trinkets and stacks of yellowing papers and envelopes, was Sterling, in his cartoonish breast coat and top hat, puffing on a cigar and shuffling through a series of agendas.

"I was just finishing up assigning tasks for the day. I'm surprised to see you awake so early, miss," he said, glancing at the window at the side of the room to note the position of the sun. It was still rising, so apparently she hadn't slept for as long as she had thought.

"I just wanted to pop in before heading out to check out this lab and maybe grab a few pointers-…" she was cut short by the noticeable disinterest in Sterling's expression, watching him return to sifting through his stack of forms. Noticing Giselle's sudden pause in speech, Sterling peered up from his papers and beckoned her for to continue, indicating he was still listening while finishing up his task.

She concluded, "…I just wondered if maybe you had a few tips for me. You know, for dealing with the Wolvies or whatever you call them."

"I am afraid that I do not. I know just about as much as you, my dear," he uttered scornfully, still rifling through his various assortment of documents. "They are vicious, they are mutations, and they feed on flesh. If you'd like to know more, I urge you to visit our reconnaissance team's station on the second floor of the library. They are the team specialized in protecting our town against these feral beasts."

"The reconnaissance team? You mean to tell me you have a team designated to handling these beasts, and you're sending _me_ out there to handle your problem?" Giselle barks with her eyes thinned and glaring at Sterling.

Sterling recoiled, leaning back in his chair and finally turning his attention away from his work and exclusively on Giselle. With a toothy, patronizing smile, he asked, "And after I send guards out to hunt ghosts in an abandoned laboratory, who will take their place in securing the perimeter here? You, I assume, miss?"

Giselle paused, recognizing their stalemate in her head. Sterling distinguished the impeccable look of defeat on her face and continued to speak, "It's not so bad, really. When you get to the lab, you press the button on the intercom around the back door of the facility. If nobody answers, you assume Merrigold is dead, and you use the explosives provided," he explained, reaching into a drawer behind his desk and slapping a brick of C-4 explosive and a small remote with one red button onto the desk, making the papers and trinkets scattered across the surface jump, "to destroy the building, all of the Wolvies inside, and hopefully whatever is helping them continue to reproduce."

For a moment she delayed, allowing the significance of Sterling's to sink into her head. She had never used remote controlled, weaponized explosives before, and the concept made her shutter. So much force, so much destruction, so much devastation lay in a one pound block of what looked like clay on the desk in front of her. Sterling could perceive her evaluating the situation and recommenced sorting through a heap of papers on his desk.

Without a word, Giselle reached for the C-4 and detonator and lifted them into her knapsack, assessing its weight in her hand. She turned for the door abruptly after and made her leave, marching through the corridors and out of the main lobby into the open area that used to be a parking lot.

"Miss, you forgot one thing!" Sterling's voice rang out from behind her. He was standing half way out of the door to the police station waving a folded piece of paper frantically in his hand. She sighed and ambled back up the steps leading to the lobby door.

Sterling stepped out of the door now, allowing it to shut behind him, as he held out the piece of paper to Giselle. "You'll need this," he spoke, indicating the piece of paper with the point of his finger, "If you ever want to find the laboratory. We wouldn't want you wandering aimlessly in the wastes, prolonging time until you end up a hearty snack. Oh, and the Wolvies don't come out until night. They are dormant during the day, so you shouldn't run into trouble unless you stir some up yourself or get lost on the way there."

Presuming the piece of paper was a map, Giselle unfolded it for observation. She was right. It was a map of The Heights and the surrounding ten miles in each direction. This must have been created by the reconnaissance team.

"That big cluster of buildings here is where we are," he said, designating their location with his finger to Giselle on the map, "And this is where you need to go." Using his finger he circled two buildings sat next to each other about a mile west of town.

"Thanks" was all she uttered as she folded up the map and stuck it into a leg pocket of her cargo pants and started towards the front gate. "No, thank you!" she could hear Sterling holler as the guards escorted her through the gate and slammed it closed behind her. Taking a glance down at her Pip-boy, she mentally noted the direction in which she was headed and continued on her mission, strutting with a determined swagger.

About an hour and a few small scuffles with Molerats later, she arrived at the laboratory complex. It was two moderately sized buildings placed next to each other, connected by a skyway in the middle. Smoke stacks shot out from the roofs of both buildings. Most of the windows around the exterior of the buildings had been shattered, leaving piles of glass resting menacingly on the floor around them. She wasn't sure what building to start with, so she promenaded around to the back sides of each building and searched for a back door to either. Only one of them had a back door, so immediately she inferred this was her door.

Before moving towards the door, Giselle swung her hunting rifle around from off of her back and placed the butt against her shoulder, surveying the area with the bead of her weapon as she cautiously approached the door. Just as she moved to press the button on the intercom panel beside the door, a whisper hissed out of the speaker below it: "Go away! Don't touch that button."

Giselle's brow furrowed. Apparently Merrigold was still alive after all. A camera encased in a black dome moved above the doorway. After a few moments, the intercom spoke again.

"Don't touch that damn button or you'll wake them up!" the voice pleaded from the other side, crackling and slightly incoherent. "If you _must_ get in, I'll open the door, but only after you put down your weapon and unload it."

With a sigh, Giselle lowered her rifle, pulling back the bolt and fishing five rounds out from the chamber. After stuffing the bullets into her pocket she propped the empty gun against her shoulder and peered at the camera with an irritated expression.

"Don't look so glum. I'm opening the door now. Don't take your sweet ass time getting in here, either" the voice decreed as the door buzzed slightly from the inner workings of its locking mechanism.

As Giselle entered the complex, a feeling of awe struck her as she looked around. She was inside a small hallway that only led to a single room, what could obviously be recognized as Merrigold's personal quarters and office, but on the wall beside her was an enormous window showcasing the dastardly FEV experiments the scientist had rigged up over the years. Enormous vats filled and dripping with fluorescent green FEV lined the outer edges of the large room, used to house wolverine clones in the radioactive chemical. Research stations were also set up with every container of FEV, included with their own computer terminal and a multitude of testing equipment. Beakers, microscopes, glass slides, magnifying glasses, burners, graduated cylinders, tongs, glass flasks, test tubes, petri dishes, measuring sticks, liquid droppers, and safety goggles were disseminated atop each desk carelessly.

She stood for a moment, staring at the disturbing scene before her, finding her dislike growing for the man who commandeered these cruel experiments.

 _Thud!_

A snarling Wolvie dove headfirst into the other side of the glass where Giselle was standing, cracking it slightly where he impacted. Giselle shrieked, falling backwards into the wall behind her and dropping her hunting rifle on the floor.

 _Thud!_

The creature pounded headfirst against the glass again. Giselle watched in horror as the crack in the glass grew slightly. She clutched onto her rifle and frenetically searched through her pocket for the five rounds she had concealed there prior, hands shaking violently and barely able to maintain her composure.

 _Crash!_

The glass shattered with the weight of the furious canine as he came thundering through, tumbling into the back wall of the hallway and rolling to a stand on four legs. Giselle froze, white knuckles grasping desperately onto her rifle as the creature rose to its hind legs. The creature stood five feet tall easily and resembled a Werewolf, a creature she had only read about in classic horror novels from the 21st century. It toted curved, razor sharp talons on all of its paws, and the pointed fangs that lined its mouth poked out from under its lips like jagged spikes.

From behind Giselle, the door slammed open and a man burst through, bearing a shotgun and screaming for Giselle to get inside. He moved toward the beast, unloading numerous pumps into the shrieking creature's body as smoking, expensed shells dropped to the floor at his feet. Regaining her poise, Giselle hurriedly crawled backwards for the door and rose to her feet behind it, still watching as the man dumped the last of his eight loaded shells into the dead Wolvie.

The man turned for the door and dashed over to it, thrusting it shut once behind it. Giselle stood for a moment, perplexed and still reeling from the sheer repulsiveness of the mutated animals. The man walked back further into the room, leaning his shotgun against a table before turning back to face Giselle.

"Which part of _don't_ take your sweet ass time getting in here was difficult for you to understand? Are you _trying_ to get us both ripped apart?" the man questioned sarcastically.

After a moment and a tense gulp, she replied, "Those things needs to be destroyed."

"Destroyed!?" the man demanded angrily. "What the _fuck_ do you mean they need to be destroyed? I'm almost finished perfecting them!"

"Perfecting them?" she asked, raising her volume for the next statement, "They're cannibalistic monsters hell-bent on mutilating and devouring anything with a fucking pulse!"

The man, who Giselle now noticed was donning a stained, white lab coat, was glowering back at her. With an annoyed sign, he confessed, "That was not my intention. My intention was creating an evolved form of guard dog, if you will. I am very close to doing so, too, except I have been forced to discontinue my work to thwart my failed experiments."

Giselle could already foresee what was coming. She knew what was coming next.

"And you," insisted Merrigold, "are you perfect person to help me resume my work."


	5. Chapter 5: By the Word of a Mad Man

Chapter Five: By the Word of a Mad Man

Tables covered in charts, graphs, and lists lined the walls of the large room with various computer terminals set up around specific lab station areas. There was a large window, with glass thick like a tree, and even a door, locked tight and barred across with a heavy metal rod which separated this part of the lab from the outer chambers where the ravenous mongrels preyed. The floor was coated with dense grime and the once white walls were staining yellow. There was a small sleeping bag set up in the corner of the room, and in the opposite corner of the room sat a running generator, huffing and whirring and clinging dependably to life, sustaining the electrical life around it. In the center of the room, under a great white light, there was a table positioned and bolted into place with arm, leg, and neck restraints on its surface. Inside the restraints lay an expired Wolvie, chest cut down the middle and pulled apart at the ribs, innards exposed and gleaming in the bright light.

Giselle sat leaned against a table, polishing off her trusted hunting rifle with a soft rag. The doctor, visibly bothered and desperate, stood next to her, rambling and explaining, begging for her able bodied assistance in what he insisted would take _just a moment_. For some undeniable reason, though, she trusted that he was down playing the entire situation to lull her into agreeing. His demeanor couldn't be mistaken as nervous. Even with as much experience or familiarity with these creatures as he had, he clearly couldn't stomach the thought of whatever he needed done. Through all of his hopeless pleas, he could barely voice exactly what he needed her to do. It always resorted to the morose begging.

"Please, just give me a moment!" the Doctor maintained, knees almost ready to buckle and collapse to the filthy floor.

Giselle briefly looked up from polishing her rifle, only to resume cleaning the barrel of the weapon thoroughly with a cloth.

"Y-You have to listen to me! Killing them is _not_ the answer! Please!" he beseeched, hands clamped together and shaking back and forth. "With just a _bit_ of help I can perfect them!"

This caught Giselle's attention. She looked up from her weapon and slung it over her shoulder as she dropped the rag on the table beside her. "To what end, Doctor?" she asked, simply, an easy question.

The Doctor repressed, releasing a drawn-out exhale, seemingly in an attempt to compose himself and explain the situation, and his reason behind creating these foul and deadly mutations. "They were simply a means for protection," he explained, the look of defeat now prominent in his features. "It's exactly what I mentioned earlier. I wanted to create the perfect guard dog. You see, my time in the Heights taught me something. You are never safe in the Wasteland. Just months after we established our village we had already been attacked by raider groups several times. There was one specific threat, though, that none of us had known about. There was another monster created using the FEV by a group called the Enclave. People say that the Enclave is comprised of the former, old world government and its lineage. While we don't encounter many Enclave this far north, once in a while one of their mutations will find its way to us. The first time was a disaster. It killed seven of us before we were able to neutralize it."

"What about the wall? How could it have gotten past your electrified fence?" Giselle questioned with a concerned tone.

"This is before the fence. The fence was not my idea. The fence reminded me of a prison. A death camp. I proposed another solution. I suggested that if I could genetically engineer a wolverine, and then use the FEV to mutate it with a little manipulation, I could create a force of elite guard dogs that would easily combat the Deathclaws," replied Merrigold, a surge of inspiration making itself evident in his voice.

"Deathclaws, huh?" Giselle pressed, interested on the subject. "Sounds like their name is a perfect fit."

"Really, this is no time to make subtle jokes," the Doctor remarked, a noticeable frown taking shape through his cracked lips. "If I can finish my work and convince the Heights to remove the wall, we can all live a lot better. It might even begin to feel like the world before… all of this again."

That was a striking thought. A world which felt like the way it did before the Great War. Was that even possible? Giselle fumbled over the idea in her head. The walls obviously did the job. Was it that bad? Was living in an enclosed prison worth a life at all? She glanced back at her recent past, remembering her incessant need to move, to be free. "All right, Doc, you got me. I'll help you finish your project. I still don't think their gonna buy any of it, though," she professed, standing from her leaned position against the table and, once again, unslinging her hunting rifle from around her back. "What do I gotta do?"

The Doctor floated over the window immediately, indicating with the point of a finger to a small overhang protruding from a wall on the opposite side of the Wolvie infested chamber.

"You see that balcony there? If you can make it there in one piece, you may be able to distract them long enough for me to get what I need," the Doctor stated, eyes remaining fixed on the balcony. "After I've got it, I'll need you to rewire a breaker and install a new fuse. That will get this place back up and functioning and I'll be able to continue my last experiment."

Giselle shuddered, following a rampant Wolvie across the chamber with her eyes as it gunned around the room like a hyperactive squirrel. "That's it, then? We aren't going to get rid of the hostile Wolvies?" she quizzed, positioning her eyes back onto the Doctor.

"I don't see the need to... unless you have to, of course, during the execution of our plan," he retorted fretfully.

Removing five .308 rounds from her pocket, she carefully pushed each one into the chamber of her rifle, yanking the bolt back afterwards with a sheepish smirk. "Well, let's get started then. Am I going through this door, or the one we came in through?" she asked, motioning to the door they had entered through with a slight nudge of her rifle.

"This one here," answered the Doctor as he wrapped his boney fingers around the heavy metal rod that kept the door locked unchallenged. He pulled the rod from its place and set it on a table beside him.

"You ready?" he chimed anxiously, positioned behind the door and ready to push it open and rip it back shut the minute she ran through it.

She arched herself forward, shifting her weight on her forward leg, prepared to make a treacherous forty yard dash. "About as ready as I'll ever be."

With that, the door shot open, and Giselle rocketed through it without a moment's hesitation. Instantly as she moved through the door she could hear it slam shut behind her, and she neglected to stop and look at her surroundings as she barreled through the room towards the opposite wall. She could hear the creatures begin to stir, and a Wolvie lunged out at her from out of nowhere. Dipping to the side, she avoided the snarling canine as it whipped past her, slamming into a desk and chair and tumbling to its feet. She was still moving her feet as quickly as she possibly could, arms working in unison to propel her rapidly to the other side of the room. Another beast darted from a shadow, just barely missing her as she again ducked to avoid a collision. When she reached the overhang she jumped, grabbing ahold of it and pulling her weight onto it with a strained grunt. Just as she went to bring her leg up, a creature clawed at it, swiping her boot and pulling half of her body down with it. Giselle screamed as she kicked furiously at the monster's head, landing many of her strongest, but soft blows to its muzzle. The beast growled as it pulled at Giselle's foot while she clung onto the overhang for dear life.

Finally, after sustaining enough kicks to its face, the creature released her foot and wilted, scurrying away on four legs like an oversized mutt. Giselle lifted herself onto the balcony, inspecting her foot for any damage. With the lack of any, aside from some tears in the fabric of her boot, she stood, leaning over the railing of the overhang and peering down into the cluster of Wolvies circling under her. They had started to attack each other, violently barking and clawing at one another to claim who would earn the succulent prize. She looked up and across the large chamber to see Merrigold silently creeping through the shadows toward an activated terminal in the corner near the door to his laboratory. Seeing him grab his things and turn back, this time abandoning all sense of stealth and sprinting back to his lab, she turned around to face the wall and capture a glimpse of her next task.

Before her was a power box. She studied it, opening it up and viewing the various switches and wires inside. Nothing looked familiar. She had never dabbled much with electronics, and she felt severely lacking in the skills it required to complete her duty. With a look of confusion she glanced back at the window where the Doctor was standing on the other side, beckoning for her to finish the job. Knowing nothing else to do, she raised her arms upwards, hoping to signify to the Doctor that she was lost. The Doctor's smile faded and he turned, moving away from the window and out of sight. Seconds after leaving from view, his voice erected from a loud speaker fixed somewhere in the room.

"What's the problem?" he demanded.

"I don't know what the fuck I'm doing!" she exclaimed. She doubted that he could hear her, anyway.

"You need to rewire the breaker. Can you see a red wire anywhere?"

She traced the red wire with the tip of her finger, following it to its source connecting to the breaker. Following it back up, she located where the wire had been split.

"When you find the red wire, you need to rewire it together. Once you've tied the connection, flip the power switch and you're done. Very simple!" His voice had grown increasingly annoying since she first arrived because of his unknowingly condescending remarks. Exceptionally intelligent people often were as such, which is how she justified his ignorance to herself in her mind.

Holding one side of the separated wire in her hand, she peeled back the plastic casing around the exposed metal and repeated the same on the opposite end. Once she had shown bare wire on both sides, she tied them together and pulled a knot tight. Moving to a stand, she flipped the switch and shut the breaker box as the building roared to life. The lights flashed on, veiling the entire room with in brightness; machines powered up, whizzing and beeping sporadically. Just as she breathed a sigh of relief, the Doctor's voice filled the room.

"Get the fuck out of there!"

Giselle furrowed her brow, turning and brushing her hands together as she peered over to the now foggy window of the lab. The Doctor stood behind it, frantically pointing up. Just as she raised her view, a thin gas began to emit from small vents in the ceiling. In an instant, the entire room was filled with a shroud of haze. The Wolvies beneath her scrambled wildly, still scratching and biting at each other in a flurry. Putting her hands onto the guard rail, she vaulted over it, landing a mere few feet from the tangle of savage canines. They promptly noticed her as she hit the floor and spared no time in leaping towards her as a collective group, but before they could pounce on her she was racing for the laboratory door. The Doctor was holding it open for her already, and she slid on one knee into the room as he thrust the door closed behind her. He hurriedly grabbed the metal rod and lodged it into the door as the creatures launched themselves into the other side, banging and thudding against it loudly. Just as Giselle rose to her feet, she could see the entire room on the other side of the window spontaneously combust, disintegrating anything non-metallic within it.

The screams and agonizing yelps of the Wolvies as they vaporized to ash were very brief, only ringing out for a mere second before they were silenced by fire. The smoke inside the main chamber had begun to settle, and the Doctor worked feverishly at a computer terminal in the laboratory while Giselle changed out the bandages on her forearms. After the smoke had subsided entirely, they ventured out, and the Doctor whisked open the door to the main chamber. He stepped out, breathing in through his nose and exhaling with a victorious sigh while his eyes studied the equipment once again at his disposal.

He shot Giselle a quick grin before starting to work at one of his stations, filling beakers and mixing them together randomly. She watched as he worked, admiring his determination, but still somewhat irked by his ignorance. He had failed to mention to her that fixing the main buildings power would initiate a failsafe sequence in the main chamber and it had almost cost her life. She barely made it out before the entire room imploded. The Doctor was happy, because after all, he managed to secure his research out of the deal, and hopefully he would at least be able to perfect his experiment. If he did, the people in the Heights may be better off. He may not get the reaction he had hoped for, but altogether they would have a severely strengthened security team. There was an unshakable fear of the Wolvies that lingered in her mind, though, and she had maintained her doubts about the success of the experiment utterly.

Roughly an hour later, the Doctor informed Giselle that he'd reached a conclusion and that he was ready to begin testing on a new clone. He ushered her over to a large tube, filled entirely with clear liquid. Floating, dormant, inside the liquid was a baby Wolverine, as cute and fluffy as a newborn puppy. Its eyes were closed tight, wrinkled at the corners. After a sequence of buttons pressed, fluorescent green goo began to seep into the chamber, gradually altering the liquid in the tube from clear to bright green. Almost as quickly as the chamber filled with the FEV, the baby Wolverine began to grow tremendously in size. She watched as its features filled out suddenly, its legs and arms growing long and thin, topped with razor sharp talons at the end of thick paws. Its back arched upwards and crooked like a rabid animal, and its chest swelled as its now full-sized head formed its new shape. Jagged, misaligned teeth sprouted in its exposed gums, with its lower jaw hanging down slightly.

The Doctor gushed in awe, clapping his hands together and marveling over the abomination contained before him. Before Giselle could even comment, he leaped over to a control panel and after a few buttons, opened the drains inside the chamber. The luminous liquid cascaded down the outer walls to the floor, disappearing into small holes there. Realizing what he was doing, Giselle raised her hand in protest, but it was too late, as the door to the chamber hissed open and released, allowing the creature to fall into a heap on the floor.

It gasped and heaved as it lay there on the floor, chest compressing and decompressing with soaked fur. The Doctor jut watched, eyes glued to the creature as it lay, seemingly dying, on the ground before him. After a moment of waiting and allowing the creature to revitalize, it slowly lifted itself onto four legs, and then two, straightening its back into a forward hunch. Its head hung, jaw still ajar with its teeth shining in the light of the room. The Doctor approached it slowly, first with a hand out and turned up, as if to allow the creature to smell him. After receiving an unexpected and quick growl, he retracted his hand back to his side. With this motion, the creature inched forward, lowering its face into the Doctor's. She could see him trembling as the creature traced the outline of his face with his nose, sniffing at him like a home cooked meal. The creature withdrew, and the Doctor took the opportunity to speak.

"I… I think… I think I've done it!" he announced, astounded.

It was when he raised his hands above his head to celebrate that he realized he had made a mistake. The creature lunged, without warning, directly into the Doctor, knocking him on his back. The creature never strayed away, fixing himself on the Doctor's torso and clawing at his midsection with its knife-like talons. Giselle slowly backed away in horror as she watched the creature tear open the Doctor's chest and disembowel him in a fit of blind rage. Blood and bits of mutilated guts painted the walls and furniture red around them as the creature ripped and pulled at the Doctor's body. She moved unnoticed, the creature fully concerned with the meal he was indulging in, while she retreated into the lab to grab the shotgun the Doctor had set against a table earlier. After locating it, she pumped it, expending a used shell from the cartridge and lobbing it to the floor. She popped open the chamber and peered inside, but there was nothing. It was empty. Apprehensively she searched through the derelict lab, tossing things aside carelessly on her search for the Doctor's ammunition. She had just found the box of shells as the creature lumbered into the lab, the fur on its mouth stained red as blood dripped from the corners, leaving a trail on the floor behind it.

For a moment, the creature just stood there, sizing her up, analyzing her, and probably deciding on the fastest way to kill her. With her breath held she slowly pressed a shell into the chamber of the shotgun and watched as the animal sprang on its hind legs. Swiftly she pumped the shotgun and raised it, feeling the severity of the weapon's recoil as it blew back into her shoulder and knocked the massive beast out of the air and into a desk five feet behind it when she pulled the trigger. She dropped the gun almost as quickly as she had picked it up, falling to her knees and grabbing at her shoulder with her opposite hand. She could feel it was dislocated. Wincing, she raised herself onto her feet, still holding her shoulder, and moved back into the laboratory.

She was ready to get out of there and back to the safety. It felt like it had been days since she arrived in this derelict lab. After rigging up the C-4 and placing it strategically between most of the testing equipment in the main chamber, she gathered her things and added the Doctor's shotgun to her collection. While looting the area for any valuables, she fashioned herself a makeshift sling for her dislocated shoulder and slung her weapons and knapsack over her opposite shoulder before fixing the sling to herself. With her arm propped softly in front of her chest, she made her exit, walking back through the main chamber and out into the Wasteland. The dirt felt gentle under her feet compared to the sticky linoleum floor of the laboratory. The sun was beginning to set and night was coming soon.

After she had walked a distance away from the laboratory, she pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Drawing from her cigarette and keeping her eyes trained on the lab, she produced the detonator from her pocket and pressed the small black button on the top of it. As the building consumed itself in a ball of miraculous fire, a smile fashioned itself on Giselle's face. She enjoyed the remainder of her cigarette on her trek back to the Heights.

After an hour of walking she arrived back at the front gate of the Heights and greeted the male and female guard stationed there. She stopped as she passed the female guard, a smirk plastered to her face as she spoke.

"So you must be Lotus, then?" Giselle quipped, mildly poking fun at the fact that she had been named after a flower.

"I'm Lotus," the male guard stepped forward with a scowl. "Why do you ask?"

The female guard just stood there, cackling.

"I, uh… No reason, really. I just assumed…." Giselle's voice trailed off.

"You assumed because she is a girl, that she would be named Lotus?" he questioned, voice firm and demanding.

Giselle felt trapped. Her joke had backfired immensely. She was at a loss for words, now staring at Lotus with a confused guise. Realizing she was just standing there frozen, and still not knowing what to say, she just kept moving. Lotus turned and watched her as she walked off toward the police station, glancing at his partner briefly before they both shrugged and focused back on their post. Giselle sauntered up the steps and into the police station, navigating through the decrepit lobby and into the office room where Sterling was waiting anxiously. He clapped his hands together one time as she entered the room, his face immediately lighting up with his robust beam. He propped himself forward in his chair and leaned in to speak to her.

"And how did we fare, my lady?" Sterling asked wryly. "Judging from the lights in the sky, I think it' safe to assume Merrigold didn't make it?"

"In so few words, yes," she remarked, clearly fatigued and maddened by the situation. Sterling retreated, leaning back in his chair and intertwining his hands together before him and touching the tips of his index fingers and thumbs together.

"Care to explain?" he wondered, ostensibly interested in either the small talk or the explanation itself. Giselle sighed, taking a moment to summarize the events in her head before opening her mouth to speak.

"When I arrived he was still alive, raving and ranting about how he was almost complete with his work. He refused to allow me to kill the creatures, instead begging me to help him finish his work. So, after I restored the power, and was almost vaporized in the failsafe procedure following it, I helped him continue his work-…" Sterling interrupted her.

"Which was?"

"According to him," she insisted, "he was engineering an evolved form of guard dog. It was a disaster. They were uncontrollable, even after his final efforts. When we had managed to kill the remaining Wolvies with the failsafe blast, he resumed his work and completed it. He used FEV on the final Wolverine clone that he had made and released it. It sniffed him, and after a few seconds made a feast out of him. I killed it, blew the place up, and here we are."

"Lovely!" Sterling exclaimed, to Giselle's dismay.

"Lovely?" she chides with a scoff. "Can I go now? We square?"

"Absolutely, my dear! Absolutely! Just one more thing, though," Sterling stated as his smile faded into a frown. "Your payment!"

Sterling's smile returned as he placed a sack onto the surface of his desk with a muffled _clank_. Giselle reached for it and swiped it, dropping it into a pocket in his knapsack and turning on her heel for the exit.

"That's it?" Sterling asked as she opened the door to leave.

"That's it," she replied as she closed the door behind her.

Giselle found her way back to her cell block and winced as she turned her key in her gate, cringing again as she pulled it shut. She removed her rifle, shotgun, and knapsack. Her armor had grown heavier and heavier in the moments leading back to her cell, so she unstrapped it and pulled it over her head, setting it on the floor against the foot of her bed. She brushed off her bare shoulders beneath her black tank top before carefully falling into her bed, as to not disturb her dislocated shoulder, and positioned herself on her back to stare up at the ceiling. Her cell was moderately dark with her curtain closed, even though the lights in the hallway remained on. Her eyes became heavy and she gently shut them, drifting off and succumbing to her weariness.

* * *

 **Author's Notes**

So, as this story is progressing I've noticed that I've amassed a small following. First and foremost, I would like to thank you guys, mostly for giving me the motivation to write and produce content for you to read. Secondly, I would ask that you give me reviews and feedback and let me know how you feel about the story. I'm writing it in both first and third person for now depending on which character we're following. I _hate_ writing in third person sometimes. I read through my first chapter today and found a lot of repetitiveness in the beginning of sentences using the word "she" to initiate an action. I polished it up, but my point is that I'd appreciate if you guys could relay any similar mistakes or areas where the story doesn't seem to flow or the word choice is too repetitive, to me. It would definitely help me produce a better story for you guys in the long run.

Also, I urge you guys to visit my profile and view my Fallout short story, _Where the Scorned Play_. You can find it on my profile page or by searching the title in the search bar.

Anyway, I hope you guys and girls are enjoying the story, and there is _much_ more to come! -Ryan


	6. Chapter 6: Forgotten

Chapter Six: Forgotten

The room instantly swelled with a thick blackness and I jolted up in my cot, dropping the book somewhere off of the side of the bed. I jumped out of bed, fumbling around the room, searching for the lantern. After blindly feeling my way around various objects, I felt success as my hands glided across the warm glass exterior of the lantern. I turned the knob on top of the lantern, desperately pleading with it to turn on.

"Turn on, you son-of-a-bitch! Come on!" I shook the lantern violently, and was amazed as the light dimly returned, only to fade back out a second later.

"Fuck you!" I yelled as I hurled the thing across the room, wincing as the glass shattered and the lantern's carcass thumped against the concrete floor.

"I've had enough of this fucking shit!" I exclaimed as I felt my way to the ladder in the middle of the room. "I'm leaving this god forsaken place _now_!"

Amidst complete darkness, I climbed up the small ladder and pressed my shoulder into the door. I bit down into my lip and pushed, groaning as I exerted all of my strength against the unbeatable foe. Blood trickled down the front of my face and I realized I had bit clean into my bottom lip. Bracing myself for another push, I repositioned myself on the ladder and pushed my shoulder into the door, my hoarse voice gargling in the back of my throat as I desperately tried to force the door open. I released, falling off of the ladder and crashing to the floor below. For a moment I just laid there, staring up into the black abyss around me. Truth be told, I don't know how long I laid there. It felt like minutes, but I couldn't help believing that my concept of time had been distorted after spending over a year in an enclosed shell. My lips arched upwards and the corner of my mouth rose. I could feel myself smiling.

I had realized something. After everything, all the preparation, all of the time and money spent to survive impending doom, it was all for nothing. Why did I ever believe that I could escape the inescapable? Why did the thought ever cross my mind? This wasn't some movie, this was real. The entire time I was working towards an inevitable end. Was it worth it? At the end of the day, stuck here, unable to see a centimeter before me, was _this_ worth all of the trouble that it had caused? Was _this_ worth giving up on the life that lead up to this? Every second the thoughts consumed my mind, I felt more and more confident that being vaporized by an atomic bomb might not be as bad as slowly dying of starvation and hunger, if I didn't succumb to insanity first. Maybe that wouldn't be as bad as it sounded, either though. Everything sounded terrible at first, but going back, isn't that what landed me in this situation?

My constant fear of what I didn't know is what led me here. Had I not given up on life, possibly enjoyed it instead of constantly trying to control my own destiny, maybe I wouldn't be in this situation. Maybe then I would have been _blessed_ with an instant death. No pain, no suffering, alongside the ones that I loved. Surely had I not obsessed over my senseless infatuations, my dreams of a post-apocalyptic wonderland, I would have at least had those – ones that I loved. At the end, I didn't even have that. I was alone, then and now. Perpetually, I was alone.

Suddenly, I envied everybody else. All of those who were graced with an instant death were more fortunate then I was – m _uch_ more fortunate. The idea of life beyond this chamber felt completely lost. I could no longer remember what I had even relished about this life. Why did I lust for an existence filled with struggle? Did I really think this was going to be an easy task? The more and more I thought about it, the more stupid I felt about the idea in its entirety. I was so confident in my ability to survive a nuclear holocaust, yet I met my match by the hands of an inanimate object. Not a radioactive zombie, or a mutated beast, or a thieving bandit; I was bested by a steel door. Was the entire pursuit a naïve reverie?

Where would I go? A year after the bombs fell, which, the more I thought about it, seemed like a small amount of time for radiation to subside, where was I to go? What was I to do? Sure, I had food, water, all of the essentials. In a perfect world, my deluded world, I would survive forever. The problem is that this world isn't perfect. Even before the war, this world was far from perfect. The only difference was now there was nothing left. There was no place to go, no sanctuary to take comfort in. Everything was surely destroyed. The world was left in a shroud of radiation and destruction. Everybody would be gone. The only people left would be those who stayed in Vaults, but I didn't have a clue when they would be released back into the world. It could have already happened. They could be out there right now rebuilding; re-forging a new society out of the remains of the one before it.

Then the thought struck me. All the same, they could all be dead. What if we were all wrong? What if the catastrophe left our world irreparable? What if we all shared the same naivety? It seemed more likely every second that my mind pondered on it. Who's to say our planet could survive such an event? Nobody would know for certain. There was no way to know, probably until it was too late anyway. Maybe they opened the vaults and everybody died of radiation poisoning anyway. There was a chance, a good one. We, as humans, have never dealt with this magnitude of radiation on a large scale. The entire world erupted into nuclear warfare. How could there possibly be anything left? The thought was comforting, but it was simultaneously enticing me to escape my tomb.

I stood up and felt my way up the ladder again, determined as ever to open the door which kept me trapped for so many days. As I reached the top, I ran my hands across the surface of the steel door again, wrapping my aching hands around the cold wheel that opened the door. It was already turned completely open, so I pulled it shut in the opposite direction. I put one foot a step higher and rose slightly, pushing my ear against the door and listening as the mechanisms inside the door worked and turned and clicked. After the wheel stopped turning, I spun it in the opposite direction, grunting against the resistance the door provided. Once it had spun its last revolution, I gathered my strength and forced my shoulder upwards into the door again. The door budged the tiniest millimeter, and a small ray of light poured in through the crack. Again, I braced myself against the door and mustered my strength, heaving as I angrily shoved myself against the door again. It didn't move any further. The light slowly faded away as the door repositioned itself back into its original placement.

"This is it," I muttered.

I was getting out. I had seen the light. I could smell the air. I could taste freedom. It was so close; all I had to do was move this door. The light was calling my name, just begging me to open the door and emerge a new man. My mind fluttered as I savored the thought. The door wasn't stuck. With the right amount of effort and determination the door would open. I was focused, ready, anxious to start again. I could practically hear the wind blowing through the steel blast door. I collected myself and positioned my shoulder against the door. Using the strength of my legs to push against the ladder, I drove my shoulder into the door as hard as I possibly could. Every ounce of strength I had left smashed into the door with a muffled thud.

The last thing I remember was hitting the floor.

* * *

 **Author's Notes**

This chapter is significantly shorter than my previous ones, simply because I wanted to do an entire chapter about our troubled friend. If anybody hasn't been able to piece it together thus far, we started the story with the account of a gentleman just as the Great War began. He locked himself inside of his own vault, however when it came time to leave the vault, it was stuck. Giselle and her story is taking place in 2154, literally seventy-seven years after the first events in the story. The two are connected, though, so, for further information, keep reading. I thought that a summary of what's happened this far with the two simultaneous stories was necessary. It seemed like it could be easily confused. Other than that, enjoy reading, **please review** , and I love you all. -Ryan


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